


Moustachioed

by what_alchemy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Intercrural Sex, M/M, Rimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-17
Updated: 2011-08-17
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:23:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John grows a moustache. This disturbs Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moustachioed

John blinked at himself in the mirror. There he was, a day older than yesterday. He looked increasingly like Great Uncle Murdo, who may as well have died of being weighted down by the jowls. John sighed. His ears were big and his hair was thinner and greyer and this damnable Watson _nose_ — it was all he could do not to run into cupboards with it. The bags under his eyes, dark and heavy like they alone carried all the tedious drama of his life story, were so bloody _tragic_ he couldn’t bear to look at them. Lines ran like train tracks through all the skin of his face — this is the stop for Crow’s Feet Cross, this is the stop for Furrows Court Road.

John shook his head at himself. _Look at me, indulging my own vanity_ , he thought. _Utterly pathetic_.

John plugged the sink and ran the hot water. He smoothed the shaving cream over his cheeks, his chin, above his lip, along his jaw and some of the way down his neck. He swirled his razor in the water, forced his gaze back up to look himself in the face, and paused.

Looked a bit like Father Christmas, all that white foam on his face. He’d never been a beard person, a facial hair person, but now he wondered if a bit of it would give his tired face some character. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know what colour his beard was; in his youth it had been a dull dishwater blond, nearly invisible against his skin, and now that he thought about it, _that_ was why he had taken to shaving it off every morning even before his enlistment. A blond beard had only ever served to make him look vaguely dirty, like he couldn’t be bothered to wash his face any given morning. Maybe it had darkened in the intervening years, or even taken a turn for the ginger. That would be just fine. And it was not as if he had to go full-beard straight away — he could do this in increments, see if it suited him.

John raised the razor and set it against his cheekbone. With practiced strokes, he flicked the incipient whiskers on his cheeks away. He inspected himself — what to do? With care to his sideburns, he drew the razor down the sides of his face, and in a decisive move, he took care of his jawline too. In the mirror he had a shaving cream goatee. Unacceptable. He grimaced at himself, stuck his tongue into his bottom lip, and shaved off the bit right underneath. Then he shaved off everything on his chin.

Shaving cream moustache was all he had left. He contemplated it.

Moustaches, he knew, were not quite the thing. At least, not amongst men his age, who could not claim fashionable irony. A moustache could go very wrong very quickly — he might be going for ‘dignified’ but hit ‘creepy Uncle John’ instead. He would have to monitor it closely, and if any small children flinched away from him, he’d rid himself of it right away, and his experiment in facial hair would be over.

He wiped away the foam and patted himself with a damp washcloth. When he exited the loo, Sherlock’s voice boomed up the stairs: “You missed a spot!”

—

On Day Two, John could see that his beard _had_ gone a bit ginger, which both pleased and amused him. It was still laughably, pubescently short, and he looked a bit like he had dirt on his upper lip, but it just needed a few more days’ time. He caught Sherlock eyeing it suspiciously every time he thought John might not be paying attention.

“It’s like a centipede died on your face,” he’d say, or something very much like it.

“Then you don’t have to look,” John would reply.

—

Day Four was so itchy John thought he might expire from the effort not to go mad scratching.

“Is this you having a mid-life crisis, John?” Sherlock demanded. “How _tedious_.”

“I’m _not_ ,” John said.

“Wouldn’t it be better to buy clothes that belong on a man twenty years younger and flirt with girls at the tills at Tesco’s young enough to be your daughters?”

“This is much more affordable,” John said. “And less likely to land me on the sex offenders register.”

Sherlock only grunted and got back to his own experiment with an iguana skeleton. John pushed his fingers into his whiskers and scratched until his nails came away tinged pink.

—

Day Seven dawned with real results: John had a lush, respectable moustache, each bristle shiny and strong, ranging in color from russet to strawberry and resulting in a rich display of some character. Altogether he thought he looked quite smart.

He went into the loo to shave off everything but the moustache, but then Sherlock was there, crowding into him, all skin and bones and yet somehow taking all the space in the room. He was like a one-man invasion annexing John.

“You know,” Sherlock said, “having a moustache does not exempt you from making yourself presentable to those of us who have to look at you every day.” He waved a pair of tiny scissors in John’s face.

John had a hot retort on his tongue until Sherlock pressed the front of his body against John’s back and all the breath left John’s lungs. In the mirror, he and Sherlock looked like a pair of lovers of long standing. The cruel parody of it made something in the vicinity of John’s chest burn.

“Here,” Sherlock said, and _great Christ_ John could feel the low reverberations of that sinful voice in his bones. Sherlock braced John’s head against the column of his own throat and held him there, then he looped his other arm under John’s armpit and began carefully, so carefully, to snip away at the bits of overgrowth that had dipped straggly over John’s upper lip. John could feel the steady intake and exhale of Sherlock’s breath, tried not to press back into the knot of flesh he knew, _knew_ was nestled at the swells of his own arse. It was too much to hope that Sherlock wouldn’t notice the burgeoning erection tenting John’s pants.

They passed some minutes in silence, Sherlock trimming and cleaning up what John had left to neglect, and then Sherlock stepped away. In the mirror, his eyes were very green.

“Just so,” he said, and then he was gone.

John locked the door behind him.

—

John woke on Day Eight before it was even properly Day Eight, Sherlock on the edge of his bed, half on top of him, little magnifying glass hovering just above the moustache. There wasn’t even light to go by.

“Time is it?” John whispered.

“Gone four,” Sherlock said as if that were a humane time to be inspecting his flatmate’s facial hair.

“What are you doing?”

“Surely even your powers of deduction are not that poor, John.”

“Well. No. But _why_ are you doing it?”

Sherlock sat back, arm falling to his side, magnifying glass firmly in hand. He was just a dark silhouette in the almost-black of John’s room.

“I have been trying to understand,” he said, enunciating each word with exaggerated deliberation, “what about this so disturbs me.”

John heaved a great sigh.

“I’ll bloody shave it off if it’s really that much trouble,” he grumbled. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”

Sherlock said nothing, but John felt the warmth of a single finger at the corner of his moustache. He tried not to breathe as Sherlock stroked through it with a light, maddening fingertip.

“My beard is very patchy,” he said then.

“Okay.”

“Can’t even grow any on my jaw.”

“Sherlock.”

“But _this_. This is a proper growth. It’s certainly defied its inauspicious beginnings, now hasn’t it?”

Sherlock leant in, closer and closer and closer until their noses aligned and Sherlock’s lips rested against John’s own. It was totally unlike a kiss. Then, Sherlock began to _nuzzle_ him, for lack of a better word. Tiny back and forth movements of his head forced John’s moustache to brush over and over the space where Sherlock’s would be if he could grow one at all.

“Sherlock,” John murmured, and the dryness of his lips caught against the fullness of Sherlock’s, and then Sherlock was kissing him, long deep draws of lips and tongue, and clambering over him onto the bed, knees framing John’s hips. “ _God_ ,” John gasped.

“Rough, possibly ticklish, likely to leave a burn along more sensitive skin,” Sherlock said.

“Are you experimenting on my moustache?”

“A happy bonus.”

John surged up and caught Sherlock round the neck. The kiss was a hungry clash, sloppy, too many teeth in too small a space, but Sherlock moaned and John could not find it in himself to criticise the technique that had got that sound out of him. With a jerk of his hips and a well-executed roll, he had Sherlock pinned beneath him, and he pushed his face into the juncture between neck and shoulder, the moustache rough on the skin just under Sherlock’s ear. A keening groan broke from Sherlock’s throat.

There were too many limbs, some awkward shuffling and a stray laugh or two, but John managed to divest himself of his pants and Sherlock of his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, and then they were skin against skin. Whiskers against skin.

John took his time drawing his moustache over the lines of Sherlock’s body while he writhed beneath his ministrations. He dragged it along jaw and throat, over sharp collarbones and down each rib. He rubbed it into Sherlock’s white belly and over the crest of his hips. Sherlock’s cock was flushed purple, so hard the foreskin was drawn back completely, glans exposed and leaking eagerly onto his stomach. John breathed deeply of the inky pubic hair, Sherlock’s scent a potent intoxicant, then he pushed his moustache into Sherlock’s drawn, swollen sac. He got a gurgling sound for his trouble.

“Tell me what you want,” he murmured against that delicate skin. Fingers curled in his hair just over his ears and pulled him further into the juncture between Sherlock’s thighs.

“John,” he panted.

“Tell me.”

“Just— just— I _can’t_ —”

John took pity on him — made a mental note to savour having driven Sherlock Holmes to speechlessness when he was better equipped to enjoy it — and pushed his moustache into Sherlock’s perineum hard enough for the rough bristles to score the soft flesh there. Sherlock gave a broken bellow, hand tightening in John’s hair. John reached up with one hand to pump at Sherlock’s hot prick, but what he really wanted was down below. He swiped his tongue over Sherlock’s arsehole, laving with broad strokes and flickering with just the tip. Above him Sherlock groaned loud enough for John to be concerned about neighbours, but he carried on opening Sherlock up with tongue and lips, sucking that tight knot of muscle until it was pliant and grasping. He hummed into Sherlock’s crack, careful not to let the moustache move away from his skin. Sherlock’s hole winked and quivered against his tongue, tasted like male musk and squid ink and spice and skin. Sherlock’s legs locked round John’s ears and he bucked enough to dislodge him, but John remained steadfast and ate Sherlock’s arse with heady abandon.

Sherlock gave a stuttering gasp of the first consonant in John’s name just before shouting and spurting all over John’s hand. He shook and gasped through the aftershocks, and John held his hips steady until he slumped back into the bedclothes, panting. John rose up and turned him on his side, slid in behind him. It seemed the disparity in their heights was all in those legs Sherlock had, and when John lined up their torsos, he found he could tuck his nose into Sherlock’s humid neck perfectly.

“Just hold your thighs tight,” he murmured. He spat into his hand before pushing his cock into the tight channel between thigh and arse. Sherlock locked his legs tight as told, and John clasped him round the middle with one arm. He panted into Sherlock’s neck as he thrust rather gracelessly, and Sherlock reached back to clutch at his arse. “God, Sherlock. _Fuck_ , this is, this is —”

He closed his teeth over the pale column of Sherlock’s throat and shouted into it as he neared climax.

“Come on, John,” Sherlock said, voice rough and low. “Need to feel you come, now.”

John grunted and pulled away at the last moment, jerking himself to a furious completion all over Sherlock’s arse, his hips. He gave a pained exhale before sagging against Sherlock’s back, forehead between his shoulder blades, moustache rather sweaty and plastered to his spine.

After a moment, Sherlock spoke.

“Was that rather good? I think that was rather good.”

“Jesus Christ, Sherlock, it was bloody brilliant.”

Sherlock turned over so they lay side by side. The changeable eyes were dilated, blue-green, eyelids at half-mast.

“So you do have sex with men, then,” he said.

A giggle threatened to burble up in John’s throat. “ _Obviously_.”

“I had to be sure. I didn’t have sufficient evidence, until this morning. Yesterday morning.”

“Just to be clear, you like the moustache? It stays?”

Sherlock flopped on his back with a long-suffering sigh. “I was determined to run it straight off your face,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Still need data.”

John snickered and shuffled closer to him. He slung an arm round his waist and rested his head against a bony shoulder.

“Collect as much as you like,” he said.

A moment’s hesitation, and then, “For as long as I’d like?”

“Yes,” John said. “Of course.”


End file.
